Lauren Cowell is right about too much screen time at school – God made our children for so much more

Around 960,000 pupils in Britain use an individual screen in every lesson at school, and Lauren Cowell (Simon Cowell’s partner) says their son’s experience has made them concerned for everyone.

”I came away from a recent parents’ evening for my son Eric asking a question I hadn’t expected: When did handwriting become something children are supposed to practise at home? We’d been talking about schoolwork, and I asked how much writing children actually do with pen and paper. I was surprised to hear how much happens on an iPad with a stylus, and that extra handwriting practice should happen after school. At home? Surely getting comfortable with a pen and paper is part of what school is for.”

Where I live in Türkiye, our school uses Google Classroom to communicate with children and parents to set homework. For this reason, by year two, my son required his own iPad. I remember feeling quite shocked by this, wishing things were like they were when I was back at school where we recorded homework (and forged our parents’ signatures!) in a “contact book”…